WD Ships First 750GB & 1TB 2.5in HDDs

Western Digital has today stepped forward to declare that 500GB is a pansy amount of storage for a 2.5in HDD and has backed this up (pun very much intended) by announcing not just a 750GB model but also a one terabyte (1TB) drive. Take that!

Both join the company's 'Scorpio Blue' line and offer 3Gbps SATA connectors, spin at up to 5,200rpm, have 8MB of cache and cram over 333GB into each platter - an industry record (until someone comes and breaks it, naturally). On the practical side, the duo come with anti-shock protection and promise extremely low noise levels in operation thanks to WD's own custom 'WhisperDrive' technology.

"The convergence of the growing mobile computing and digital media trends produces demand for desktop-like capacities in portable devices," said WD senior VP and GM of client systems Jim Morris. "Our new WD Scorpio Blue drives enable people to take even more of their digital collections with them wherever they go and, realising the value of their data, back up their notebooks on their My Passport drives."

Andy0d2

July 27, 2009, 7:23 pm

They are 12.5 mm not 9.5mm, once 9.5mm drives are here then its time to celebrate since it will mean they can be put in mainstream laptops and dare I say it... ...netbooks (ATM upgrade only but 1TB is 1TB)

Gordon394

July 27, 2009, 7:29 pm

@Andrew Violet - agreed. 9.5mm will offer more flexibility.

xbrumster

July 27, 2009, 7:36 pm

when will HDD firms actually give you 1TB to store data on instead of 960GB ish

MadMacs

July 27, 2009, 7:36 pm

Am I right to guess that only rather old laptops will support 12.5mm 2.5&quot; drives? I&#039;m yet to have a modern laptop pass me by which would seem to support a 12.5mm height drive. I guess maybe some Dell XPS/Alienware or Panasonic Toughbooks may support them due to the extra bulk they carry?

Premfab

July 27, 2009, 11:50 pm

A technological (is that a word?) achievement.

However, is it of any use? 1Tb laptop = nightmare to back up. The rest of the computing world is not really geared up to deal with this e.g. copy 1Tb over wi-fi, or running AV scans, etc.

Anyone with a 1Tb laptop drive, which they cannot back up effectively over wi-fi or usb, is tempting fate - surely???!!!!

MrGodfrey

July 28, 2009, 12:01 am

No 1TB Playstation 3 yet then? :P

MadMacs

July 28, 2009, 12:05 am

@ xbrumster : You&#039;re probably aware but just incase I&#039;ll say it anyway, but it&#039;s all to do with the decimal and binary way in which the data capacity of the drive is measured. A HDD vendor tends measures the capacity in decimal units, whereas Windows is coded to read the drive in binary units. Numbers and me don&#039;t get along so that&#039;s about the best I can put it.

Exactly why Microsoft can&#039;t work in decimal and vise-versa for the vendors isn&#039;t something I can answer, lol :)

Andy0d2

July 28, 2009, 1:01 am

@Shaun It is very common for manufactures to round 1024 as 1000, on smaller drives eg 100GB this isn&#039;t such a problem however at larger capacities this does become exaggerated, to the point where its a matter of 50GB or more, which is not insignificant. I think its more the principle than anything, since I doubt anyone will fill up a 1TB to within 50GB.

Tony Walker

July 30, 2009, 9:55 am

Currently using (well once this 300gb copy has finished) 1.3Tb of data on a 2Tb RAID 1 drive - on of the WD ones TR reported on from a while back.

Actual proper byte/kb/mb/gb/tb capacity is reported as 1.81Tb (2,000,390,512,640 bytes when I open the properties for the drive)

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